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If we'd have done the right thing, and voted Regressive, we wouldn't be having these kinds of issues.
http://thebestpageintheunivers...

Maddox, is that you? ["...I've chosen a black background for most of my text because it's easier on the eyes than staring at a white screen. Think about it: your monitor is not a piece of paper, no matter how hard you try to make it one. Staring at a white background while you read is like staring at a light bulb (don't believe me? Try turning off the lights next time you use a word processor). Would you stare at a light bulb for hours at a time? Not if you want to keep your vision."]

Maddox http://www.thebestpageintheuni...

maddox... is that you? http://www.thebestpageintheuni...

Yup.

It's like these people have never heard of Handango. They're so ignorant it is funny.

I have double feelings about having to quote maddox about this, but he put it quite succinctly:

First of all, if you're leading your life in such a way that you never have to do math, congratulations, you are a donkey.

Why is math the only discipline that has to put up with this bullshit? People gladly learn art, music, literature and geography. You'll even nod like a happy idiot when you learn what a haiku is, and you never complain or whine about how you'll never use this in your "life." When is the last time you wrote a haiku, asshole?

Don't be a Padhole

Ugh yeah, I wish people would stop using Segway as an example of useful innovation. The technology behind them is interesting, but as a whole they failed to actually improve transportation in any fashion.

That's not true. Not true at all. Why a few weeks ago I was at Gettysburg and I saw a group of tourists on Segways re-enacting a cavalry charge on the contraptions. It was brilliant, I dare say. And they looked like the coolest people in the entire battlefield!

Ugh yeah, I wish people would stop using Segway as an example of useful innovation. The technology behind them is interesting, but as a whole they failed to actually improve transportation in any fashion.

Correct.

Hey this made me think about this rant:
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone

the Nokia e70 could ssh before the iPhone, and had a full keyboard

Also, the n900 can hold multiple ssh sessions at the same time, and those sessions can be either to or from the device. The iPhones ssh implementation is not comparable.

Despite the obvious troll, I am compelled to reply. Everything I want to say is here. I especially like: "Every year millions of animals are killed by wheat and soy bean combines during harvesting season".

Do you grow all of your own food? No, you don't, so you also contribute to animal suffering on an industrial scale. I guess living 'sustainably' and making a 'good' choice is all well and good so long as you aren't too inconvenienced by it. Once it's too inconvenient, you are only too happy to have small animals fed to the harvester for your comfort and enjoyment.

Hypocrite.

Congratulations, you are a donkey.

BTW notice how you never see "wish lists" from iPad users..

Nope. I work at a very MAC centric company. I'd guess that 80% of us use MAC hardware. Everyone has numerous complaints about all their hardware, including iPads.

"Wish lists" are only for those with flawed devices.

Or people who are smart enough to know what they want/need. Or higher expectations than just having an Apple logo on their device.

And, does anyone actually use Android tablets? All the web usage stats show iOS devices leading by a massive margin.

What exactly are Android tablets used for? Doorstops?

They really are useless junk. Just get rid of them, replace them with iPads, so you don't have to waste everyone's bandwidth trying to fix them through more useless "wish lists"..

Apple, Linux & Microsoft based products all have advantages and disadvantages. It all depends on what you are trying to do that decides which is the best tool. I'm sure I'm wasting my time as it's obvious you are either trolling and I fell for it, or you worship everything Apple because you are too fucking stupid to think for yourself.

But thank you for continuing to prove Maddox correct.

Vote regressive http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=regressive

Who wants to yell at household devices? I'll pay a thousand bucks right now if I can get a module that does voice command -> doing things implanted in my kids.

You don't need to spend a thousand dollars on that! There are easier ways.

People who point out their puns should be put to sleep

There were plenty of free sites on the Internet in the 90s when few people ran ads. Many of the were better than modern sites because they didn't have the desperate need to bring in more users to make more money from those ads.

And that was when a hosting account cost far more for far less than you get for the same price today. Of course every page didn't include a megabyte of Javascript crap to 'Web 2.0'-ise it.

http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/

Its not just HuffPo, but other sites as well (see: http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=ranker_sucks)

This garbage is just as terrible as television.

This story is HI larious. http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=conny_permission

It is clearly an attempt to brainwash the masses before they learn of the conspiracy behind the sinking (please look at the video before modding me... please).

Now more seriously, it can have several lectures:

*) The arrogant Man and his works, defeated by Nature/God.

*) The folly/stupidity of the organizers, who did not put enough boats.

*) The law of great numbers, which make it a lot more newsworthy 100 people dying together in a plane crash than 1000 dying in 1000 separated car crashes.

Also, the fact that some wealthy men perished there did make this history more resounding and appealing to the media of the era.

Its probably an automatic scan like the one that gets setup by Norton. After all, the technical competency of certain desktop users has always been questionable.

Maddox talks about this. The idea is to single out one offender at a time, and hurt them. Apple probably isn't the best choice unless an extraordinarily large boycott can be organized. Anything smaller won't even be felt by the company.

Great write-up about the symmetry between multiplication and convolution

Great hate-article about people who reflexively jump (heheh) on use of goto

these animals have a distinct personality and if they weren't going to be food I could be friends with it

animals are people too!! http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=bsitu_speciesism

A third-party tool that was horrible, to be sure, but again, where's your citation that they blamed the users and ever said what you put in quotes?

Unfortunately, hes NOT lying, and that quote was from a fairly high up executive...
Mr. THOMAS HESSE (President, Sony BMG Global Digital Business): Most people, I think, don't even know what a Rootkit is, so why should they care about it?
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4989260

That quote isnt itself a crime, but it certainly is a poor attempt to defend their actions, and kind of indicates Sony's relationship with its customers.

If you want to know the reasons basically everyone on the internet hates sony, you can start by reading Maddox's take on it (which is pretty spot on, despite the crudity of it). Long story short,

1. They shut down Lik-Sang. Wonderful, now I cant buy Hori controllers anymore. The irony of it is that apparently even Sony employees were importing thru LikSang
2. They had the whole rootkit debacle mentioned above, which they handled with the grace of an elephant and about as much tact as Maddox. I think they eventually released a tool to remove the kit, which ended up either causing further problems or not actually fixing the broken CD drives it created. (Windows reinstall necessary). Mark Russinovich has a writeup on the whole thing, but the NPR link above summarizes it pretty well.
3. Part of Sony is Sony BMG, which is part of the RIAA that everyone on the internet loves so much.
4. They started removing features from the PS3 from iteration 2 on (USB ports, etc), which is always a way to make your customers love you.
5. They got the crap hacked out of them, and then denied the severity of it, resulting in two rather spot (and hillarious) on Penny Arcade comics. They also posted a...post... on it which basically sums it up: They lack the ability to communicate in a meaningful way with their customers.
6. Theyre behind Blu-Ray, and its encryption, which again is super duper popular with normal slashdot folks.

Not all of those are crimes (blu-ray), but when you add them together you get the impression that Sony doesnt even really pretend to care about its customers, and really is your stereotypical faceless monster of a corporation. They barely even have a cool-factor to offset it, like Nintendo can pull off.

Beating your meat is different from mincing it. Accurate terminology, fellow geek. Also, Maddox says I have to, if I really love my children.

Hold your breath
Or the Piano wire suicide

Shame Maddox (the author of the above page) now has an iPhone: http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=af11

Why Nokia is the pinnacle of human achievement, while the iPhone is a piece of shit

Sounds plausible. But consider this ...

If the CIA wanted DSK gone they could have created a watertight case and made him unquestionably guilty. They could easily have gotten to the defense lawyers as well. Why would they go to all that trouble only to have their great coup be unraveled by a simple 5-item timeline? It's like loose change all over again.

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=puns

This is a slippery slope. It could be argued that white (or black, I don't know which are now more popular in US highschools) people using your products would attract others to it.

I was about to say something similar. In certain areas and certain age groups (okay, under 25 or 30 and north of any southern accent zones), adding [some] attractive black men to your crowd in somewhere like a night club would likely increase the place's profile as a "hot" club, particularly to suburban whites. I think it was a side effect of all the rap music my generation couldn't stop listening to for years, even when it started to get really bad. On average, black guys are cooler than white guys.

And while the race argument actually holds true, places that gave identical pricing to all people would hopefully win a free market scenario. The bad publicity would likely do the rest.

...then again, I'm pretty sure that practice would probably be illegal in the US anyway. Here, even recognizing that someone is anything other than white skinned for the purpose of comparing anything about him or her to someone who is white tends to be completely taboo, particularly among whites. It makes me sad that I can't talk about skin color plainly to most people for any reason at all, even for simple observation, or for simple compliment.

I'm suddenly reminded of this.

I don't find it surprising that slashdot users favor android. I also don't find it surprising that they are a bit antagonistic about iOS. Your study here is akin to going to a secular humanism newsgroup and then concluding based on the posts there that atheists are numerous and more antagonistic than theists.

I don't have any data to back this up, so I'll understand if you decide to disregard my opinion, but my experience is that android users are far better informed about iOS and its advantages and disadvantages, and tend to prefer android on its merits more than out of fanboyism (though surely it is a factor, I suspect it is less of a factor than with apple). As for why they might be antagonistic? I don't know, but it might be at least partly a reaction to apple fans being obnoxious about their products. I'm reminded of Maddox's bit on apple. I've met quite a few apple loyalists who seem unwilling to consider alternatives, and when you consider that the alternatives usually provide more value for your money in all of the quantifiable ways (except number of apps with iOS devices), it comes off as a reaction to cognitive dissonance. You see them rationalizing about how you can't get viruses with apple computers (you can) or how things just work (in my experience, they often don't) or how apple's support might be better (they might be right).

And I know what you're probably thinking. I'm just a fanboy and I don't see it. But it's not quite as simple as that. My first smartphone *was* an iPhone. My initial assumptions about Android were generally negative. Seemed like a copycat and I was skeptical that it could perform as well. I used to come up with any rationalization I could, even when presented with conflicting evidence. "Well surely the iPhone easier to use" or "It's probably more reliable" or "I don't need to run multiple processes" (yes, I know, they fixed that) or "Voice dialing? eh, it's a luxury I don't have any use for". Reading reviews and talking to people, I learned that actually android had a lot to offer that iOS did not, and I got increasingly fed up with the lack of features. What finally did it in for me was when the iOS4 update turned my iPhone 3G into an unreliable useless piece of slag. Apps would autoclose themselves, take forever to load, etc. (some apps, like the dictionary one, would autoclose every time before fully loading). Some of my games became useless. All of my data was deleted by the sync operation. Sure, some of it I synced and got back, like contacts, apps, and music, but most of my app data was gone (including videos I had taken with a 3rd party app since the iPhone 3G didn't have integrated video capture). It was as if I suddenly noticed my apple koolaid was spiked with piss. Yes, I could have gotten an iPhone 4 and most of those issues would have been answered, but by then I no longer thought of apple as any better than anyone else if I could experience all of those issues... so I opened my mind and looked into alternatives, and based on every quantifiable feature, android phones just looked better.

please don't point out your own puns

Maddox has written an article about this trend ...

Nobody cares if your puns were intended.

And not just the first line?

In the fan community, this has changed into the idea that something is only canon if it appears in the original source material, and thus any Word Of God has no more weight to it than any piece of fanon cooked up by the fans. Though some fans honestly hold this opinion, many only use this as an excuse to ignore any Word Of God that they don't like. Some fans can even take this further, and use this to ignore parts of original source material they don't like, per the Fiction Identity Postulate. A recent example would be the Harry Potter fans who ignored or even protested J. K. Rowling's comment that she thought of Dumbledore as gay.

This is a given in works where the authors don't hold copyright and can be replaced, especially Shared Universes; if a writer is fired and replaced by another, anything the old writer has stated in interviews can be (and often is) freely Jossed by the new writer.

Also, note the "a concept from the field of literary criticism" part.
You know... criticism... as in "interpretation". As in "how it all ACTUALLY happened" explained by the person who DID NOT write the story.

Not that that can't be fun too. Ever seen Dante's Peak? Ever seen it as a Terminator/James Bond crossover?
Pay attention next time to evil robots, character back-story, absent fathers, female mayors with affinity towards waitressing living away from the main hubs of civilization, and how fate treats those who stand in the way of Sarah Connor and James Bond romance and him becoming the stepfather/mentor of the savior of humanity. The story culminates in a temporal rift that causes a rupture in Earth's crust, destroys an entire town and half a mountain - just so that particular time-line could occur.

But that is not the "official" story. Nor would it be continued in that vein.
Which is a pity. It would surely beat anything post T2 and Die Another Day.
What was it those two recent supposedly 007 movies had the apparently immortal secret agent do? Ah, yes... Win a card game against a guy who cries when he gets upset and chase around a guy stealing water.
And the less is said about the last Terminator the better.

At least when done by Hollywood is that it simply boils down to drama.
And when I say drama, I mean what passes for drama on TV. From Housewives to REAL Housewives. That's what they think of when they say drama.
Characters yelling at each other.

As for "I robot" - it failed cause it sucked. All it took from the book was some names and a very distorted understanding of three laws.
At the same time it was utterly formulaic "renegade cop" movie - only with robots. Robots equipped with a handy "I Evil" LED indicator inside their chests that turns red when they decide to start killing people.
Also, pointless product placements.

maddox agrees with you

... Halo, Modern Warfare 2 are the worst of the lot. The whole reason for this article is Medal of Honor ...

I can't speak for Halo but I'm pretty sure MW2 had difficulty settings and I know Medal of Honor has difficulty settings because I played that piece of shit game last night. Easy and Normal maybe but I think that Difficult would take more than a couple tries on most levels.

You're just mad because it doesn't mean anything to beat a game anymore. Sure, on XBox you can get gamer points or achievements for beating it on the hardest setting but it bothers you that others can experience the same rewarding progress dopamine that you get. Well, that's never going to change. By the very nature of how that is rewarding to you is the fact that you're a select few of maybe ~10% of the population that can beat the game.

So Craptivision can either shutout some of their content to the vast majority of players or introduce difficulty settings so the toddler across the street can mash the controller in order to beat the game in easy mode. That drives profits and the only thing they see as a sacrifice is the rare super gamer that feels a bit miffed he or she just forked over $60 in order to autopilot through a game.

You know I still played through all the levels of difficulty in Goldeneye on the N64 and didn't feel cheated. When I ran that train level on 00-Agent difficulty night after night after night I can still think back to those rare times when I would laser the engineer room hatch open with my watch and then drop down with Natalya only to have to run down the length of the train with people shooting at our backs. One bullet in either of our backs and we were basically dead. That goddamn bitch always died. Always. I swear to Christ when I eventually passed that level it was by sheer bug alone that she did not die. So after that cruel Sisyphean task that my friend and I worked together strategizing and getting through it, I was rewarded and will never forget some of those levels.

Games are getting easier but I ask you what does it matter? You will have your difficulty settings (usually) so play only on the hardest setting and enjoy your Contra III style impossibilities. The era of earning progress through a game has largely come to pass unless you look at the end game material of WoW at any one moment. Final Fantasy XIII was a travesty in this respect. And profit dictates it will stay that way.

Maddox: One thing PC users can do that Mac users can't

It is a little outdated since it's bitching about iTunes 7, but the arguments still apply.

Your post was worthless without source.

Thank you for your insight :)

Here in New Zealand, I run my Original iPhone on a prepaid plan, I am charged from my remaining balance (I normally put on $20NZD (15 USD or so) at a time), and my imported iPhone cost only about ....600USD all up.

New iPhones are about 1300 NZD here, for the top of the line, about 922 USD according to Google conversion. I dont think thats unreasonable for a phone that will last years, until you upgrade :)

I find it hard to imagine getting worked up over a Nokia! I know friends who five+ years ago lusted after different Nokia models, normally because they "folded" in some "cool" way, nothing really hardware specific, just they were "high end" and Nokia was the only game in town. I believe the main phone one friend liked was the "e70", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_E70 , Maddox certainly approves, http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone , the market, not so much :)

Thank you for your opinion!

... an Internet communications device!

If you don't like Mexicans, don't buy hamburgers.

Thanks for the tip, Maddox.